Note to world: I am working here tonight in rural Dublin, New Hampshire. I’m all alone in the rambling Yankee offices. There are lots of rumblings and hissings and ghosty like sounds. If am consumed by the ghosts and taken off to the basement, land of the undead, please send my love to Catherine and Oliver.

Later: Okay, so it was only a fly buzzing around the light fixture, not a ghost. Or maybe a ghost dressed as a bee. It’s 11:24 p.m. and I should really leave so I can sleep. But I’m afraid to turn the lights off. Wish me luck…

Neil Postman died on Sunday. He was 72.

In the fall of 1984 I was living in Toronto, attending Grade 13 at the Ontario Science Centre Science School. One day I found myself in the Bob Miller Book Room on Bloor Street browsing through the remainder bin, and there I stumbled across a book called Teaching as a Subversive Activity, written in 1969 by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner. I was intrigued by the title, and bought the book. I think I paid $1.99.

I went home and read the book from cover to cover in one weekend. For a young mind like mine, coming off the back end of 12 years of mostly dreary formal education, it was a compelling, mind-expanding read, unlike any book I’d read before. Here were two guys writing about an entirely different approach to education and learning, an approach designed to outfit students with what they termed “crap detectors,” grounded in real world experience. I was hooked.

The next week I was scheduled to present a “book report” in my biology class. Reasoning that people were biological as much as anything else, I conspired to use Postman and Weingartner’s book as my topic. I believe, if memory serves, I received a failing grade, my choice of topic not being sufficiently biological to sync with the curriculum.

I did learn, however, that my biology teacher, the excellent Judy Libman, had read Teaching as a Subversive Activity herself at a similar time in her life. And so, despite the failing grade, our common experience, and the discussion that followed, forged a friendship beyond the borders of curriculum and biology, and we keep in touch to this day.

I read and re-read the book many times that year, and from there read Ivan Illich, and learned about Rochdale College, and Summerhill, and other “different” approaches to education. And the lessons I learned were enough of an inspiration to get me enrolled in the teacher training program at Trent University the next year: I was ready to take Postman and Weingartner’s theory and turn it into practice.

That idea didn’t pan out: I realized within weeks that becoming an elementary school teacher was doomed to destroy me, if only because I was going to be forced to adopt a peer group of teachers who loved their own school years and were poised to keep the fun on going. I truly couldn’t imagine spending a career making small talk in the teacher’s room with my status quo loving fellow students. My fate was sealed when I was invited into my teacher education professor’s office one afternoon and asked if I could be, well, a little less iconoclastic about things. Apparently my contrarian nature was getting in the way of others’ learning. I think it was my suggestion that we reconsider teaching children how to read, and instead teach them how to watch TV, that pushed things over the edge. And so I drifted out of teacher education.

That same year I was also enrolled in Computer Studies 100. The professor for that course was Stephen Regoczei, a quirky Hungarian in his first year teaching at Trent. At the end of the first lecture — a massive hundred-person affair, uncharacteristic for Trent — I approached him and, now infamously, told him that I thought taking his course might “get in the way of my education.” To my surprise — iconoclasts don’t often have their icons invite them for coffee — he invited me back to his office to discuss this idea, and what resulted from that encounter was a collegial friendship that’s lasted almost 20 years now (Stephen is coming to the Zap your PRAM conference later this month).

Stephen too, it turned out, had read Teaching as a Subversive Activity, and its effects on him had been similar to its effects on me. At this point, I knew I was on to something.

Postman went on to write many more books, including Teaching as a Conserving Activity in 1979, which many, most of whom didn’t actually read the book, took as a recanting of his first book. It wasn’t: it was more a sequel.

I left university after a year and, in a way, have spent the time since then carving out for myself a kind of self-education based on the principles that Postman and Weingartner espoused: learning from experience, following my curiosities, taking different paths, meeting different people, exploring the vocabularies.

About 5 years ago I found myself at something of a life impasse. I had been working for 15 years as one form of computer programmer or another, and while I was earning a good living, working on interesting projects, I wasn’t sure I could go on working in a field the core beliefs of which — “better living through technology” — I didn’t actually, in my heart of hearts, believe. And yet what else could I do?

I decided to write Neil Postman a letter. I went on at some length about how I’d read his books, and followed his thinking, and thanked him for his inspiration. And then I laid out my personal situation, and finished by asking if he might offer any advice.

And he wrote back!

I received in the mail, several weeks later, a well considered reply to my request. He said, to paraphrase, that although he generally hesitated to offer advice, he would, in my case, make an exception. He suggested that, rather than abandoning my work with technology, I seize the opportunity, as someone both versed in the use of tools and aware of their dangers, and write about, learn about, and otherwise explore my technological world. In short, he suggested that I try to leverage my skilled doubts into some valuable, helpful criticism.

And so that’s what I’ve tried to do.

This weblog is one result. My work on the radio is another. And the approach I take with my clients, which urges a gentle, sensible application of technology rather than a frenzied, religious adoption of it, has Postman’s stamp on it as well.

If you read one piece of Postman’s writing, I would suggest it be Informing Ourselves to Death, the text of a speech he gave to a group at IBM in the early 1990s. In it he summarizes his own views of our technology-drenched society, and talks about where “information,” our current drug of choice, fits in. No other document I’ve ever read so closely mirrors my own views and doubts about my choosen field.

I always thought that, someday, I would get a chance to thank Neil Postman in person for the tremendous influence he’s had on my life. I didn’t get that chance, alas. And so, although it’s a pale imitation, I’ll say thank you one last time here.

Neil Postman will be missed.

I saw one of these trailers at a dealership today. It was one of those “holy shit, look at that” moments. Wow.

One of the oft-overlooked aspects of PHP is that you can write scripts in PHP to execute from the command line. I fell into the habit of writing data munging scripts in Perl, and web pages using PHP; I realized I was keeping alive two types of code needlessly.

How do you do this on a Linux machine? Let’s say you have a script called make-ducks.php…

First, find out where your PHP engine is:

whereis php

You’ll get back an answer that looks something like this:

php: /usr/local/bin/php /usr/local/lib/php /usr/local/lib/php.ini

The /usr/local/bin/php is your PHP engine. Now simply insert the following at the top of a PHP script you want to run from the command line:

#!/usr/local/bin/php -q

Make sure this is the first line in your PHP script. You can then leave everything else in the PHP script as you would have it otherwise. Mark the PHP script as executable:

chmod +x make-ducks.php

Now you can go ahead and run the script like it was a regular Linux command:

./make-ducks.php

The only difference is that output that normally goes to the browser, including error messages, will now be printed in your terminal window.

Neato!

Big news on the Formosa front: the couple that runs the venerable University Ave. restaurant in Charlottetown has purchased the former Big Mommas location on Prince Street, all 3000 square feet of it, and plans to either move there entirely, or keep the existing location open and open a new branch there. The menu will be expanded on Prince St., and they plan to open one floor to start, with others to follow. Expect an opening date of next spring.

Let’s hope they can break through the curse on that building: it’s been so many restaurants, from so many owners, over the time we’ve been on the Island that we’ve stopped counting (and, a couple of owners ago, stopped going, just because we expected the worst). Apparently this isn’t a new curse, either: I talked to someone today who’s got 15 years on me, and he said the same has been true all his life as well.

If anyone can make that location work, it will be the tenacious couple at the Formosa. Here’s hoping they make a good go of it; I know that our family will be regular and enthusiastic customers there, especially as they’ll be only 2 blocks from our house.

Amazing, isn’t it, the explosion and success of interesting food in Charlottetown in the past year. I remember reading a fantastic column by Len Russo in the Eastern Graphic several years back: he was writing about the arrival of the Just Juicin’ juice bar to Queen St., and compared it to the arrival of pizza on the Island in the early 1970s in importance and earth-shakingness. I think we’re into another quake now.

I really miss Len’s column in the Graphic; he’s a fantastic writer, one of the best columnists I’ve ever read regularly. Our loss in Canadian Tire’s gain.

This week our Canadian neighbours celebrate Thanksgiving while our American cousins celebrate Columbus Day. And, what’s more, the leaves, on both sides of the border, are changing colours, so the so-called “leaf-peeping season” is in full swing, especially south of the border (leaves, it seems, aren’t such a big deal here in Canada).

While the tourism season ended on Prince Edward Island almost two months ago, after Old Home Week in mid-August, there’s a huge fall tourism market (see Seasons, an excellent, beautiful new product from my colleagues in New Hampshire at YANKEE).

I’m off at the crack of dawn tomorrow morning to spend a week in New England; as a direct result of the leaf craze there, I couldn’t find a hotel, B&B or other room to save my soul within 50 miles of rural, leaf-drenched Dublin, New Hampshire.

Fortunately, my friend, and former YANKEE, Lida, who swapped houses with us last summer, came to my rescue and hooked me up with two friends of hers from leaf-drenched Harrisville, NH (home of Harrisville Designs, for you spinners and weavers in the readership), so that is where I’ll be based from tomorrow evening until the end of next week.

The irony is that in this most colourful of seasons, I’ll be spending most of the next three days readying a couple of new servers for installation at new colocation facility, totally unmindful of the leafy heaven swirling outside. I’m just thankful to have found a place to rest my head at night.

I’m still searching for someplace to spend a couple of nights in Boston on the flip side of my trip; rooms seem to be tight and expensive, so something must be going on there that weekend.

Back in town on Sunday, Oct. 19. Take care of the Island for me; regular updates from the road to follow.

Here’s a recent note from the CBC’s Corrections Page:

In a news story on September 27 about the earthquake in Japan, CBC News Online said “Hokkaido is home to 16,000 people.” The population of Hokkaido is actually closer to 5.6 million.

Here’s a great page that gives details and pictures of the studio that Christopher Lydon uses to record his excellent audio interviews.

From CBC Prince Edward Island comes this perplexing story:

Canada’s four Atlantic provinces will have to pay back millions of dollars in health, social and equalization transfers to Ottawa following the discovery that more than one per cent of the people thought to be living in the region are gone.

Emphasis is mine.

Our take-no-prisoners babysitter Emily is part of a plan to purchase a new grand piano for the Beaconsfield Carriage House. Emily is the Dean Kamen of high culture in Charlottetown; it’s hard to resist her energy. If you’re Beaconsfield supporter, or enough the kind of culture that gathers around a grand piano, you would do well to support her mini-fundraising drive. I’m sure Beaconsfield can probably tell you where to send your cash.